"Do I look like I'm crumbling?" Dynes shot back when asked during an hourlong interview Thursday whether he were more the type to harden under pressure or crumble.

Dynes' comments came the day after three state senators called for him to be replaced over revelations of hidden executive compensation, and two days after the Bureau of State Audits blistered UC officials for, among other things, circumventing compensation policies set by the governing Board of Regents.

Dynes answered those blasts indirectly at the time, firing bullet points of changes he's making to fix what has gone wrong over the last decade at the institution he's led since 2003.

In the interview, too, he didn't respond directly to urging that he leave. But his position is clear: "I'm not ashamed of anything I did."

And if his political capital were a tank of gas, where would the needle point?

"I'm actually not thinking about that," he said. "I'm just not thinking about that. I'm going full bore to putting things in place to do the sea change that's necessary here. So I'm not thinking about political capital.

"In spite of all the pain, this is a remarkable challenge, and pulling it off would be -- will be -- a tremendous legacy."

Dynes faces a daunting task. Over the last six months, the university has been hit by revelations involving millions of dollars in hidden perks and benefits flowing to some of the university's highest paid employees. Compensation policies were waived, ignored or circumvented.

The public, and sometimes even the governing Board of Regents, was kept in the dark. At the same time, the state's budget woes were forcing sharp increases in student fees and steep declines in student services.

Still, at least some of the failings predated Dynes' appointment as president in 2003. In fact, UC was accused of hiding executive pay packages from the public during another compensation scandal in the early 1990s, when the university supposedly fixed the problem.

Robert Dynes, 63, grew up in a lower-middle class Canadian family in the snows of western Ontario and learned to take it as well as dish it out. In the interview, the skinny, confident hockey player of 50 years ago showed through with occasional flashes of feistiness -- several times swiftly chopping arguments he didn't agree with.

Dynes, now tagged in news reports with the fatal-sounding adjectives embattled and beleaguered, said it's been rough, but the roughest attack he ever experienced was when a school bully lay in wait for him every day as he walked to school in the fifth or sixth grade. He'd offended the other boy.

"It was probably some smart aleck thing because I do have a tongue sometimes," he said. "He would lie in wait for about a week and beat me up every day. That was a perpetual pounding."

Why didn't young Dynes change his route?

"Of course I did," he said, "but somehow he'd track me down."

The worst thrashing he ever gave out was during a high school hockey game. He crashed an opponent into the boards.

"People did check people into the boards in those days, but it wasn't quite as routine," he said. "I drew a penalty for that one because I really did line him up and lay him over."

Dynes will appear before the regents May 17 to give an account of the compensation situation. The state auditor's report said the president's office appears to regularly grant exceptions to university compensation policy and the university sometimes hasn't been forthcoming on non-salary compensation.

Does Dynes feel he has any confessing to do for his own hand in any pay decisions?

"I've done mea culpas already," he said. "I did mea culpas at the hearings up in Sacramento, and the mea culpa was to not fully disclose to the regents what we were doing. But understand that these recruitments were, and still are, in the interests of the university -- to try to get the best people we possibly can and trying to attract them to the University of California.

"It takes, I believe, flexibility to do that, especially in a very competitive world. And our competition for the most part are private universities, and we're not on a level playing field.

"Do I believe we made some mistakes and we systematically made some mistakes? Yeah. It wasn't that I was trying to hide anything. It was the nature of the practice. ... That's the way we functioned, and I continued in those modes following advice of folks and went after the best people we could find. And I will explain to the regents what the thinking was at the time, what I felt we had to do to get them.

"I have no regrets in getting them."

It's clear Dynes sees the crisis as an opportunity both for himself and for the university, and enjoys some solid and some provisional support among academic leaders as the compensation controversy plays out. Dynes is supported in part because he, too, is an accomplished academic, his publications list running 12 pages.

He ran the chemical physics research unit at Bell Labs from 1983-90, then jumped to UC San Diego as a physics professor and rose to the department's top job before being promoted to senior vice chancellor for academic affairs. He made chancellor and after seven years was named UC's 18th president in 2003.

"I have found him to be an engaging and brilliant guy who's in some tough circumstances," said Michael Brown, vice chair of UC's Academic Senate. "We're not always responsible for the circumstances we're in, but we are responsible for how we respond to them.

"Does he respond to these critics with strength, with vision and with commitment and skill? And if he does that, he's the man, and if he doesn't, he ain't."

John Oakley, the faculty senate's chair, said the underlying issue is what it costs to maintain the pairing of top research with the accessibility to all qualified California students that marks the university.

"I think it's going to be gut-check time for the people of California," he said.

Dynes seems to be thinking that way, too, as he reforms the compensation system while looking beyond the crisis at the same time.

"These are serious issues. I know they're serious issues," he said. "They're systemic issues that must be repaired, must be fixed. We have to be careful in fixing them. We must fix them, we're a public institution.

"We have to be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and that baby is the finest university in the world. We have to maintain the quality of the university while fixing things that clearly do need fixing, and that makes it a unique challenge ... I and my colleagues are inventing it as we go along and we will probably make some mistakes on the way and have to correct for them."

Dynes' repeated pronouncements to take responsibility for the systemic breakdowns and his increasingly detailed lists of proposed solutions look like the beginnings of a comeback strategy. He laid out some of his plan, should he survive.

Recruiting administrative talent is at the top of his list. Dynes is looking for a new crop of leaders nurtured inside UC, and stressed this at meetings with campus chiefs and university vice presidents.

"If you look at the gray hair or the no hair of the people, it's inevitable that people are going to be leaving," he said.

Dynes is recruiting to fill six top vacancies in the president's office. He said he's also thinking about creating a new position responsible for finance.

"I actually have a quite unique opportunity to redefine what the Office of the President looks like, the relationship between the Office of the President and the campuses, and really rebuild in a different mode what the University of California looks like."

Dynes has maintained all along that competitiveness is the bedrock issue in the compensation flap. Some UC officials say base pay levels are lower than those of competing institutions and therefore plenty of winning bids to land desired candidates have been cobbled together with extras.

Such patchwork, in paying employees as well as in setting student fees, seems to be a part of the UC culture Dynes wants to get rid of. Fixing it means raising pay university-wide and holding the line on fees, to say nothing of restoring cutbacks in student services and catching up on building repairs.

All this will cost money. UC officials estimate that recovery from four years of budget cuts and underfunding requires $1.5 billion per year, which includes $283 million for academic and nonacademic salaries and wages.

Who pays?

"I would like anybody to do it," Dynes said. "The state, yes. Feds, yes. Private philanthropy -- I use that word quite pointedly. Any way that we can support public education.... I'm a huge believer in the (UC) master plan, I'm a huge believer in equity, and we're not there. By equity I mean the university is accessible to every student who is eligible."

Yet he said the university can be successful without claiming as big a share of the state budget as it did in the past.

He stressed that he wants to minimize student fees and end the sharp jumps of recent years. Student fees cover a third of UC's spending. "I want it to be as low as possible, absolutely," he said. "I would really like to see it go back.

"Ultimately I'd like to see a fee that's tied to mean family income," he said. "I would like to see it tied to what people in California are earning so it doesn't encroach on their quality of life. We've had that in the past, then the good times came and the fee increases were bought out and the bad times came and the fees jumped. That's almost the wrong way around."

Dynes said UC is generous with aid to low-income students but middle-income families are feeling the pinch and students are falling into debt.

"I would really like to see some way we can construct a debt-free path for students," he said.

Dynes sees private resources coming into play in one major way to maintain academic quality: UC officials want to double annual philanthropic giving from $1 billion to $2 billion and use the money for scholarships and graduate fellowships.